Happy
Birthday Kostas Paskalis!The legendary
Greek baritone is 77 today: he talked recently with Bettina
Mara about his life and career. (BM)

“This new
Macbeth production (in Glyndebourne)…is unique thanks to one artist’s genuinely
brilliant performance: Kostas Paskalis in the title role. His baritone is of
seemingly endless power, remarkable continuity and precision. Here is a voice
that contains metal, and its owner knows how to use it artistically and
tastefully, with sensitivity and intensity alike. It exudes a nobility bordering
on the divine…”

Such was the praise showered on Kostas Paskalis by
the Sunday Times in June 1964, following his Glyndebourne
debut. The legendary Greek baritone, one of the most in
demand world-wide in the 1960’s and 70’s, will be 77 years
old on September 1st. Now retired as a singer
but an active voice teacher, he lives in a comfortable
northern suburb of Athens, where he spoke to Bettina Mara
about his career, his teaching activities and the art
of opera in his country.

Mr. Paskalis, Wikipedia has listed you as a Greek-Austrian
opera singer....?!

Yes, that is quite
amusing, and no doubt a result of the many years I spent
at the Vienna Staatsoper, but although the Austrian government
awarded me the title of Kammersänger, I do not
have Austrian citizenship and none other than Greek blood
flows in my veins. I was born in Levadia – near Delphi,
as I always add for those not so familiar with Greek geography
– but I spent my childhood and formative years in Athens.
I was first introduced to music in church, as a member
of the boy’s choir of the Athens Metropolis Cathedral,
which is more or less the Greek equivalent of the Vienna
Sängerknaben. My father saw to it that I was exposed
to classical music as much as possible, which was not
something that went without saying in Greece at that time
(or even today, I might add). He proceeded to send me
to the Athens Conservatory, where I initially studied
piano. At first, I wanted to become a conductor! Later
on, before I finished my voice diploma, I sang in the
chorus of the Greek National Opera (GNO). One day, a soloist
suddenly fell ill, and that was the year, 1951, in which
I made my GNO-debut at the age of 21 as Rigoletto.

Was this the beginning of a life-long leaning towards
Verdi roles?

In
a way perhaps it was, although naturally I sang much more
than just Verdi: the whole Italian repertoire, and many
other roles as well. In 1958 for example, when the Viennese
agent Vladarski was in Athens to see Fidelio at
the ancient Herod Atticus Theater at the foot of the Acropolis,
I happened to be appearing as Orest in Gluck’s Iphigenie
en Tauride at the GNO and was “discovered” by him.
My debut at the Staatsoper in Vienna in Un Ballo in
Maschera followed soon after that – a great challenge
for me, not least in linguistic terms, since until then
I had learned all of my roles in Greek – together with
Nilsson, Di Stefano and under the baton of my compatriot
Dimitris Mitropoulos, which was a stroke of good fortune.
He is the conductor whom I learned to appreciate most
during the course of my career, even though, or perhaps
precisely because he was quite blunt in his dealings with
singers – I can still remember how he once told a famous
colleague who hadn’t bothered to prepare properly for
a rehearsal properly that “with the fees they pay you,
surely you can afford to hire an accompanist to teach
you your part!”. In any case, Karajan then offered me
a contract in Vienna, initially for three years, and the
rest is history. I stayed on for 25 years, and gave approximately
650 performances in Vienna alone, not to mention many
others in Germany, in Italy at the Scala in Milan and
elsewhere, as well as in the whole of Europe and in the
United States.

On the occasion of your Glyndebourne debut as Macbeth,
one critic wrote that thanks to an expressive voice and
a profound understanding of your role, you succeeded in
showing how much Verdi’s music enhances Shakespeare’s
drama – or words to that effect. Did that make this your
favorite or most successful role? Are there any others
you would have liked to sing? And how much did you devote
yourself to the work of contemporary and Greek composers?

It’s
hard to say which was really my favorite role, but I am
certainly very fond of the one that people like to identify
me with, and in which I gave my debut in 1964 in Glyndebourne
– a festival which does much more than just cater to stars,
which is a very commendable aspect. What took a little
getting used to there was the smell of alcohol from the
audience that would waft towards the stage after intermission…
Rudolf Bing heard me sing there, which led to my first
performance in New York at the Met the following year,
in La Forza del Destino, alongside Franco Corelli
and Cesare Siepi, followed by stints at almost all the
other major US opera houses. I certainly can’t say there
were any roles I didn’t sing for lack of opportunity,
on the contrary, I was able to build a very broad repertoire
– some would call that being an old-fashioned all-round
singer these days, but in my opinion there are many who
might well benefit from it, not least in terms of motivation.
And when I was asked to sing in Hans-Werner Henze’s
Bassarides – the premiere of this work in 1966 is
probably my most well-known encounter with contemporary
music – in English in Santa Fe, after having performed
it in German and Italian, I declined, enough is enough!
The operas by the 19th –century Greek composers
Pavlos Carrer and Spyros Samaras, which were “excavated”
more or less recently and have since been performed occasionally
here in Greece, were still unknown then, but Manolis Kalomiris’
(1883-1962) The Mother’s Ring is a remarkable Greek
opera which I was fortunate to be able to perform in.
I also recorded Mourning for Ignacio, a poem by
Garcia Lorca set to music by contemporary Greek composer
Stavros Xarhakos, in 1965; the narrator on that recording
is actor Manos Katrakis, who also read the poetry of noble-prize
winner Odysseas Elytis on the original recording of Mikis
Theodorakis’ Axion Esti.

Anthony
Michaels-Moore and Kostas Paskalis

What did you think of the recent revival of the Visconti
production of Don Carlo at the Athens Concert Hall? You
were a member of the cast of the original production in
Rome in 1965, which was also your debut at the Opera di
Roma, with many celebrities in the audience, one of them
Alain Delon, who would soon star in Visconti’s film “L’Etranger”.
The performances were all sold out, even though ticket
prices were around 40.000 Lire – a fortune at that time
– and the Italian press criticized the production, calling
it wasteful and pompous, but you received much praise
for your brilliant debut as Rodrigo!

In
my opinion the Athens production was simply too long,
and I was not the only one who thought so, as would be
the fate of almost any performance that lasts until 1:30
in the morning. In Rome, nowhere near that much time was
required to shift the sets, even though they were much
the same in both cases, but in Athens there were simply
too many intermissions, short and long, to the point that
the music somehow no longer made sense, although there
were some noteworthy artists involved, for example Anthony
Michaels-Moore as Rodrigo. The Athens Concert Hall’s new
stage is vaunted as being one of the most modern in the
whole of Europe, but apparently they have yet to learn
to use it appropriately. The Greek press paid much more
attention to the opening of the Concert Hall’s new underground
parking facilities than to the opera itself, which shows
you where priorities tend to lie in this country.

You
also served as artistic director of the GNO from 1988
to 1990, what was that like?

Those were three
difficult years, which I don’t really care to look back
on. And I still visit the GNO on occasion as a member
of the audience, but it is usually fairly disappointing.
Our government grants almost no support to opera in this
country, and there is little interest in or understanding
of our art. This leads to much disillusionment among young,
promising singers – and I’m not alluding to unsatisfactory
fees here, but rather to the lack of artistic challenge
– and as a rule, these colleagues still decide to seek
their luck abroad, just as they did in my day. If anything
has changed since then, it is for the worse. Naturally
I am not exactly impartial, being an opera singer myself,
in believing that my art has more to offer than traditional
Greek bouzouki music, but surely popular and classical
music should be allowed to exist alongside each other
and receive the same kind of backing – the wide-spread
opinion here that classical music is only for intellectuals
and university graduates is simply wrong, especially at
a time when opera has become more accessible world-wide
thanks to modern productions and contemporary works. Perhaps
it would help if we referred to opera as “music theater”
more often – Greeks seem to be much less reluctant to
try out classical drama than classical music. And while
we are on the subject, I do not agree with some colleagues
of my generation who are dismissive of the surtitles used
in theaters today, saying that they are like crutches
for a generation of singers who can’t be bothered to work
on their diction. On the contrary!, we all know that audiences
didn’t understand every word in the old days either, and
if opera is not supposed to be an art form accessible
only to a select audience, we can’t expect people to be
familiar with the text, not to mention the language that
is being sung.

After
having taken on so many different roles on stage, how
do you see your current offstage role as a teacher?

At
first I thought that teaching was not for me. But then
I became more and more interested in it, and this was
precisely because of the problems I could see many students
needed help with. Of course on the whole, young people
begin their voice training based on a better musical background
than in the past, when it was customary for many to rely
on their hearing alone and have no formal musical training
whatsoever. And even those of us who have perfect pitch
know that their ear can let them down at times, and it
is never quite as precise as what their eye can recognize
on paper. Nonetheless, singers still tend to be the least
educated of musicians. Time and again, students who really
have no idea what they are doing will show up in my master
classes. I always tell them that a large measure of modesty
is in order when you are starting out: even a well-prepared
singer is like a first-grader when he steps on stage in
front of an audience for the first time, meaning that
he still needs to be prepared to work on the basics, the
ABC of his trade. This includes the realization that the
voice is a musical instrument of a very special kind,
designed not only to make music but also to produce speech,
laughter, yawns, etc., an instrument that is not for sale
and cannot be loaned to others like a violin or a piano.
One of the most important things students need to acquire
is the capacity to listen to themselves and each other.
This is something that I have often noticed as a jury
member, for example at the Callas or Tchaikovsky competitions,
which I am always pleased to be involved in, because I
am interested in getting to know the new generation of
singers. To me, music means communication, it is an international
language, and whoever masters it will be understood everywhere
on our planet – but naturally you have to learn to speak
it first. In addition to voice, I also teach opera studio
classes, and though naturally technique is one of the
core elements of what I try to convey to young singers,
this is an aspect that has not changed much over the years,
whereas the contrary is true of the way roles are interpreted
on stage. If we could still hear Caruso sing live today,
we would probably have a thing or two to criticize with
respect to the expressive aspect of his performance, with
all due respect for his superb technique.

At
a master class that you taught this May in Athens, you
were very frank, but never unkind, with some of the less
promising students, and also demonstrated that you are
still in much better voice than most of the participants
could ever hope to be, especially when you showed them
how to make a long note sound more interesting…

Yes, and it is
vital to point out these things, because nothing is worse
than a boring singer! I also try to make sure that my
students understand how important articulation is. They
need to understand what they are singing first and be
able to speak the words correctly, with the accents on
the right syllables, in order to achieve the right effect
when singing them. I have always believed that good articulation
when speaking is a prerequisite for good singing. And
of course I am never unkind to students, because I respect
all young people who come to me for guidance – and I have
always said that a skillful artist is often capable of
making his drawbacks into advantages – but I am also very
honest and will not tolerate anything that is not right
or not sincere and genuine. Falsetto doesn’t sell,
it’s the kind of thing that is left to lie on a store
shelf.

Looking
back, would you have liked to do anything differently?

No!
I always did what I believed in and what gave me satisfaction
in the course of my career, and besides, I have been much
more successful than I could ever have hoped for when
I started out. I have no patience with people who look
back and say “what if…” or “if only I had…” - I couldn’t
be happier with what I have achieved!